[Spook E]

Sorry guys just got my first apple have some newbi qs.

1. When i sold my XP laptop i backed up all my email from Outlook 2000 as a .pst file, does anyone know how i can get these imported to exchange (yuk) or mail?

2. Is there a way to stop iPhoto from loading all my photos on startup? ive got heaps and it takes ages, i was hoping to setup a blank album and this would be the default, but no go?

3. Is there a list of super handy apps ill need? i know i shouldnt be so lazy to ask but find my own, but all my old windoze haunts havent got the stuff

Thanks everyone, loving this powerbook (except maybe for the bloody massive keys )

[bergy]

Re: #3

For Your Info ...

For trouble free computing ... I recommend using these ..

Macaroni ... just set it and forget it. Only utility of its kind to work AUTOMATICALLY
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/9633

Macaroni is a tool which handles regular maintenance for Mac OS X's Unix core. Normally these tasks run on a regular schedule, in the middle of the night. However if you don't leave your Mac on all night, they never run. Your Mac won't wake from sleep to handle this. Macaroni solves this problem. If a scheduled maintenance task is not run when it's normally scheduled, Macaroni automatically ensures that it's run at the next opportunity, whenever the Mac is on. Repairs permissions also, on a weekly basis.

Also every month or so ....
Cache Out X
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/9538
Cache Out X clears out the cache entries on your machine, helping you recover valuable disk space on your machine. Items removed include the caches in System, Users, and Library, along with the Internet Explorer download cache. Optionally clears the IE's history cache as well.

I love this muticlip app....
iClip
http://inventive.us/iClip/

Defragging?
From Apple ...
OS 10 Disk Optimization
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

"For most users there is little benefit to defragging ... however ... if your disks are almost full, and you often modify or create large files, there's a chance they could be fragmented. In this case, you might benefit from defragmentation. "

Tech Tool Pro 4 will defrag if you must.

Most importantly ... buy a copy of "Disk Warrior" and run it every couple of months.

Avoid "third party system hacks".

For complete peace of mind, before a year of ownership runs out, get Applecare. It will pay for itself with one service issue.

Good luck and welcome to the Mac World!

[peterthorn]

Originally posted by Spook E:
1. When i sold my XP laptop i backed up all my email from Outlook 2000 as a .pst file, does anyone know how i can get these imported to exchange (yuk) or mail?

I'm sorry, but my only solution would be the one described at http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/faqs.html (search for pst).

Good luck,
Peter

p.s. about the other issues - I can only second bergy's suggestions!

[mitchell_pgh]

A word to the wise...

1) Be friendly here, and people will be falling over themselves to help you.
2) Be very specific with your questions. (Include your hardware, issues, OS version, application version etc. etc.) It will save everyone time when posting.
3) Get a big poster of Steve Jobs and kiss it every morning. It's like virus scan for the soul.

Welcome aboard!

[Moonray]

I have to differ a little with bergy.
Most people operate OS X trouble free without the help from utilities like Macaroni or an cache cleaner.

Fact is that there are some maintenance routines scheduled at nightly times and that they won't run if you turn your Mac off at night. It won't won't have a measurable impact to the system performance if they are not run, however some logfiles might grow larger than usual.

Repairing permissions is sometimes seen as a wonder cure for anything like resetting PRAM and alike but is usually really not necessary because these permissions don't screw up themselves. However it does help if you are superstitious but then you can start it manually.

Then cache cleaning is nonsense. Applications will take care of their caches themselves if they use one and would only fill it again as soon as possible. Clearing them might reduce your performance and you won't gain anything for it, not even space. Clearing browser caches if you have sensible data in them can be done from modern browsers themselves and as automatically if you have the need.

Don't clutter your system with utilities you don't understand and you don't need only because others tell you. Mac OS X runs fine out of the box and unless you run into problems there is no need to change things.

Use the built-in help functions, they're sometimes very extensive.

-

[bergy]

None of my recommended apps will do any possible harm to your system. If you read the boards for a time you will see that these steps are generally followed in sequence until more drastic measures are needed.

Not just only my opinion ... for your investigation please read these..

Panther Mainenance Tips Macdevcenter
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/ma...intenance.html

Why wait till something goes wrong when you can avoid it with these simple programs?
Especially Macaroni ... it's a no brainer.

Resolving Disk, Permission, and Cache Corruption
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/repairprocess.html

[Moonray]

Ahem...

The X Lab is trying to sell a book "Troubleshooting Mac OS X" and will of course say that you need this and that to survive all the issues you will encounter with OS X and the how-to is written in their book. They have of course no interest in telling you that you usually won't run into any problems.

MacDevCenter wants of course to attract readers too. But alone that things are published on webpages does not make them being true.
Quote from that article: "However, some poorly written applications may damage your file structure". That's pure nonsense and everyone who knows a little how computers work will agree. Normal applications don't deal with the file structure at all. They open and close, read and write files using the given system APIs and don't access the file structure because the operating system handles all these calls. So poorly written or not, all they can screw up is the data in a file and there will no "maintenance app" help. Exception are of course applications like DiskWarrior or Norton Utilities that are explicitly intended to deal with the disk structure.
It continues: "or a clunky installer can ruin the permissions of what it installs". Of course could that happen, but such bugs are pretty rare. And if that should happen then no maintenance tool would help either because it would not know how to fix what. If there got something installed using the OS X pkg mechanism, then repairing permissions would restore the clunky permissions each time, and if it got installed any other way then it got not even touched by anything.

So be careful when you read and don't believe everything you see. Rather try to use your own brain and get an idea of how things work to understand them better.

OS X ran fine for years before these apps were out and if it ain't broke...

-

[JNI]

Originally posted by Spook E:
When i sold my XP laptop i backed up all my email from Outlook 2000 as a .pst file, does anyone know how i can get these imported to exchange (yuk) or mail?

There is an open source project called libpst at sourceforge.org that is a command line tool that will convert a .pst file into a unix style mbox. From there you can either use command line mail to access the mbox or import the mbox into the Mail app.

Unfortunately the developer ran into some legal issues with libpst and had to pull the version that supports OS X. The latest version available at sourceforge must be run on a PC or x86 version of Linux . The issue with that version is that it must run on a little-endian machine, so Linux on the Mac won't work either. So if you have access to a little-endian machine, you could do the conversion there and then move the mbox file to your Mac.

The tool isn't perfect. The 0.4x versions that got pulled were much better. But even the posted version can pull out the majority of the data from the .pst file, depending on the version of Outlook that created it and the kinds of attachments and such that are in it.

If you're a developer, you might be able to do the work yourself to add big-endian support to the posted version (though it's not exactly easy.)

I'm not sure what the legal issues are of making a big-endian version available for OS X. I've contacted the author to see if he can elaborate. If you contact me via PM I might be able to hook you up with a version that works on OS X. I don't want to get into any legal issues myself, but I'll see what I can do.

[bergy]

"OS X ran fine for years before these apps were out and if it ain't broke..."

Like 10.1 for example?

"or a clunky installer can ruin the permissions of what it installs". Of course could that happen, but such bugs are pretty rare. And if that should happen then no maintenance tool would help either because it would not know how to fix what.

Straight from Apple .. unless you know more than they do

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.h...onID=anonymous|44855325&kbhost=kbase.info.apple.com%3a80%2f

[alien]

Originally posted by Moonray:
I have to differ a little with bergy.
Most people operate OS X trouble free without the help from utilities like Macaroni or an cache cleaner.

...

Then cache cleaning is nonsense. Applications will take care of their caches themselves if they use one and would only fill it again as soon as possible. Clearing them might reduce your performance and you won't gain anything for it, not even space. Clearing browser caches if you have sensible data in them can be done from modern browsers themselves and as automatically if you have the need.

Umm, you're way out on this one.

It has been a common problem on OS X that corrupted caches will cause apps to crash or behave weirdly.

A few days ago, I had problems with Calculator crashing when trying to update the currency exchange rates. Solution: trash the Calculator cache file.

Under Jaguar and earlier, it happened more than once that a preference pane wouldn't load, or show up in the System Preferences app. Solution: trashing an associated cache file.

Sometimes you can trash such cache files by yourself, other times a cache cleaner is easier to use.

[Moonray]

Just for the record:

Apple only explains a procedure on that page. Permissions don't damage themselves, file names don't either.

Applications might screw up their own caches or preferences but this is not the regular case and does not justify to clear all caches or preferences of all applications on a regular basis. The above mentioned application does erase browser caches and will not 'repair' your broken calculator. It offers too to erase virtual memory files which will lead to a system crash if you don't reboot immediately, but then these vm files would be erased anyway.
This and other "applications" are scripts written by people who seem to write their stuff without technical foundation based only on stuff that's passed on like here by people who feel it might help. There is a risk that they might as well erase important data.

I use OS X on two Macs and never installed any such weird stuff, never repaired any permissions, never cleared any caches and obviously never had the need to.
I don't erase any partitions before I install a system update and do normal upgrade installs with absolutely no problems ever.

I am not superstitious.

-

[mitchell_pgh]

I've had very few issues with my system. The few have been from not waiting a full day before installing an update. If you do this, you are almost guaranteed not to run in to major problems.

Second, I've run in to a few very small issues, and have come to the boards. Half of the time, they have already answered the question, the other half of the time, it's answered in around five minutes...

Amazing...

I have yet to find a "OS X" book that can halp.
REASON OS X is maturing SO fast, they can't keep up. It usually takes a few months to go from final draft to print (not including all the time to actually write the book). In that time, there is usually an update (or four) that solve the problem.

[Ratm]

Originally posted by peterthorn:
I'm sorry, but my only solution would be the one described at http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/faqs.html (search for pst).

Good luck,
Peter

p.s. about the other issues - I can only second bergy's suggestions!

I think the work-round is to import it into Mozilla then export it to Mail(?) or when Mail asks if you would like to convert/import your old mboxs locate the folder. Hope it helps.

[ebsidohw]

Originally posted by Spook E:
1. When i sold my XP laptop i backed up all my email from Outlook 2000 as a .pst file, does anyone know how i can get these imported to exchange (yuk) or mail?

Dunno if this is an option for you, but if you have an IMAP server, just upload your mail tree to the imap server from the XP laptop, then download on your mac. That's how I ended up transferring all my email from Outlook XP -> Entourage

[JKT]

Originally posted by Spook E:
2. Is there a way to stop iPhoto from loading all my photos on startup? ive got heaps and it takes ages, i was hoping to setup a blank album and this would be the default, but no go?

Not exactly, but if you view by film roll you can collapse them all and just open them when needed (in iPhoto>View>Film rolls or command-shift F, then clcik the disclosure triangle beside each roll to collapse them).